


Sometimes I Wonder (Why I Spend Such Lonely Nights)

by beedekka



Category: Homicide: Life on the Street
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Angst with a Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Second Chances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-08-10 00:22:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7823005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beedekka/pseuds/beedekka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some people just need a second chance to get it right the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sometimes I Wonder (Why I Spend Such Lonely Nights)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sidewinder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidewinder/gifts).



> Thank you for the opportunity to write this perfect pairing of jaded romantics! I hope you enjoy the fic :)
> 
> This is a canon divergence with respect to some of the events of Seasons 5 and 6: upon returning from leave after the fallout from the Arson Unit corruption investigation, Kellerman partners up with Munch straight away, and subsequently doesn’t become involved in the Mahoney shooting.

 

_**February**_

 

The scrape of chair legs on the floor, accompanied by a muffled thump and some inelegant swearing, pulled John out from the pages of his book with a start. It had been quiet for so long that he’d forgotten anyone else was even in the bar with him. He looked over to see Kellerman squinting at the clock above the register and trying to haul his jacket on with one arm too far around his back. “You need some help there, friend?”

“Is that really the time?” Kellerman asked, voice rough like he’d just woken up.

John checked his own watch against the clock and nodded. “Near enough. I should’ve closed already.”

“You were waiting on me?”

His choice of words made John smile. “Well, technically that’s what I was here to do.” Kellerman frowned, not getting the joke, and John mourned a good witticism wasted on the wasted. “No, I wasn’t humouring you. I should have tossed your sorry ass out of here a half hour ago, but I was reading and I didn’t notice how late it had gotten.”

“Can I get one for the road?”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” John eyed him trying and failing at his jacket for a second time.

“Nope, but that doesn’t usually stop me… What the fuck is up with this?” Kellerman held the jacket out in front of him and shook it a little, as though that would help.

“How about you shake your wallet out while you’re at it? If you can get your tab down to double figures, you can join me in a toast to the end of another bleak and disappointing day, my treat. I’ll even take pity on you and re-offer my assistance with getting dressed.”

“The lining was caught or something,” Kellerman defended himself. “And I got about five bucks total, so I guess you’ll be drinking your whiskey alone.” He finally got the coat on and scrubbed his palms over his face. “Probably for the best; I’ve had a gutful.”

“You’ve been hitting it pretty hard lately,” John observed mildly, wondering if there was any point in letting his partner know he’d noticed that at a time when the chances of Kellerman actually remembering the conversation in the morning were dubious.

“That something to you?”

“You’re my partner; if you’re going to follow the patented Beau Felton guide to working Baltimore Homicide, then I should at least try and point out the reasons why that’s a bad idea for both of us.”

Kellerman laughed then, leaning heavily on the edge of the bar and shaking his head.

“What?” John asked. “I know that from this side of the taps I’m supposed to be happy you’re such an ardent customer, but from the other side – where I’m not relying on your money to pay my alimony – I actually want to be able to offer a listening ear, or some help, if there’s something going on that’s driving you towards the demon drink.”

“For real?” Kellerman shot back. “You give a fuck that my glittering career as a murder police turned into a piece of shit around me? Yeah, I’m sorry to tell you that I do not believe my well-being makes any difference to how you sleep at night, Munch.”

“Fine. Forget I said anything.” John held his hands up. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Goodnight.”

Kellerman mimed an exaggerated doffing of his cap and headed towards the front door in a broadly straight line, before dragging his keys out of his jeans and dropping them right on the floor.

 _Shit_. John bit his lip. He couldn't really let him walk away, let alone drive, like that. “Wait,” he called.

“What?” Kellerman was hanging onto the wooden doorjamb and unsteadily swiping up the keyring as he spoke, muffled and tight.

“It isn’t safe for you to drive like this. I’ll take you.”

“Fuck,” Kellerman swore, still muffled, but loud enough for John to hear even though he seemed to be directing it at himself. John watched him as he straightened and rested his forehead against the door for a second. Then he suddenly brought his other hand up and smacked himself a couple of times across the side of the face, hard. “ _Fuck_.”

“Hey! What are you doing? Stop.” John got around the bar and over to his partner faster than it took him to consider whether that would be welcome or not, but by the time he’d caught Kellerman’s wrist in his fingers the tension had already gone out of his arm and he let John pull it loosely down. “What the hell was that for?”

“I can’t direct some good ol’ fashioned anger at myself?” Kellerman asked him bluntly, turning to give John both barrels of his usually icy stare; instead of the familiar cold blue, the shadows and the orange light cast by the streetlamps outside reflected in his eyes, animating them darkly. They held each other’s gaze like that for a few seconds, Kellerman apparently daring John to tell him otherwise. Then, just as abruptly as the energy had dissipated from his raised arm, the fire of his anger seemed to quench and he stepped back from the door and held out his other hand – with the truck keys – to John. “Here, take ‘em. ‘The life you save may be your own’, blah blah blah…”

“I’ll lock them behind the bar and drop you home in my car,” John said, throat dry. “You can pick them up on the shift tomorrow.”

Kellerman nodded, and by the time John had finished closing down the register and turning the wall and pump lights off, he was standing out by the car, smoking and looking across the harbour. The air was damp from rain falling earlier, but the midnight cold was enough for his steaming breath to make it seem like he was shrouded in smoke.

“Okay?” John asked.

“Yeah.” Kellerman took a final drag and flicked the cigarette away, still moving clumsily as he got into the passenger side, although visibly calmer than he had been before. “It’s not far – just the right distance to be a bitch to walk when the weather’s like this.”

“Point me in the right directions.”

Kellerman did, in between fiddling with the radio until it was playing some godawful industrial rock show and winding the window down so far that John was sure he was fixing to puke out of it. When he indicated a set of parking spaces on the edge of the water, John was simultaneously relieved and confused to be stopping there.

“Which is your place?”

“You wanna come in and see it?”

Saying yes was probably a poor idea, but John had never really been able to glean a whole hell of a lot about Kellerman’s home life outside of recently having crossed paths with his itinerant brothers and knowing that he was a member of the divorce club too, and his interest was piqued.

“Just for a minute.”

Out on the harbourside, Kellerman slung an arm around John’s back and started down towards the jetty, and then it clicked.  

“You live on a boat? Wow, you’re a walking cliché!”

Kellerman snorted. “Yeah?” Then his heavy workboots slid a little as he stepped from the concrete onto the wet wood of the walkway and they both inhaled sharply, John reflexively tightening his grip under Kellerman’s shoulder and taking the extra weight of the slip. “Shit,” Kellerman breathed out, then suddenly laughed and threw his head right back so that John had to hold their balance even more.

“Mike, if you pull me into that water I swear…”

“Relax – how many times do you think I’ve staggered across this death trap? No splash yet.”

“Don’t tempt me to make it a first time.”

The momentary danger had left John holding on firmly enough that he could feel the contours of his partner’s muscles under his jacket, along with the solid warmth of his body and the way his chest vibrated as he laughed again. It was unusually close for them to get to each other, but he wasn't going to ease up his support while Kellerman was only half watching their step on the boards. The further they walked though, the more John began to realise that he wasn't the only one hanging on. In fact, Kellerman was holding him back a little more closely than he really should've needed for equilibrium, leaning into him and bumping their hips together. It was subtle, and something John could almost have brushed off as accidental.

 _Almost_.

Except there was no denying that ever since they had started working together they’d been dancing around that unspoken question; catching each other playing the pronoun game or looking for a second too long at men in a way that Bayliss would never let himself; joking about keeping an open mind when it came to love and sex; yanking the cuffs back a shade more forcefully on the perps who broke out all the slurs when they were up against the hood. Those things added up, and all of a sudden John could’ve kicked himself for not recognising that Kellerman’s drunken invitation onto his boat was coming out of the context of all of that. And he could have kicked himself again while he was down because the irony was, if the timing had only been a little better - if Kellerman had been sober and not so busy tearing his own sanity apart with paranoia about who did or didn't believe he was a dirty cop - John would have jumped at the chance to see what would happen if they crossed that line.

But he didn't want to do it like this. Not so close on the heels of the farce that was the Arson squad grand jury, with Kellerman bitter, in the bottle and reeling. Not when John couldn’t be sure that his partner’s interest was really anything more than a knee-jerk reaction to him having offered a shred of concern and a sign that someone was still looking out for him, back in the bar tonight. Regardless of how badly he might have wanted to find out if there could be something more to the nascent connection the two of them had been forging over the last few weeks, John couldn’t ignore the truth that this would be an awful opportunity to screw their partnership in a hundred unpredictable ways, and right now that was one of the last things they should be risking.

So when Kellerman closed the door to the little cabin cruiser behind them, paid lip service to offering John a drink and then leant straight in to kiss him, John turned his cheek to catch it there and stilled Kellerman’s hands on his belt with a gentle grip. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, as Kellerman’s face registered the confusion he probably had every right to be feeling. “I shouldn’t have come inside with you; I just wanted to make sure you got here okay.”

“You’re fucking kidding me!” Kellerman yanked his wrists away and shook his head in disbelief. “Do you know why I just made that move? Because you cued it up: you made nice with me in the bar, you offered me a ride home, you said ‘yes’ to coming inside, and now you’re in here – now it’s real – you’re backing off faster than a dealer when the shield comes out… Why would you do that?”

When John didn’t come up with an immediate answer – too blindsided by the vehemence of his partner’s reaction – Kellerman threw up his hands and moved angrily to the small kitchenette, leaving John standing awkwardly where he was. “Why does _everyone_ keep doing this to me? Everybody gives the right signals – ‘Yeah, I like you’, ‘Yeah, we’re all in this thing together’ – and then they bail. When anything gets remotely fucking serious: gone. And here’s Mikey, eating the rejection, taking the fall, or whatever fuckin’ else it is the world apparently thinks I deserve at that moment.”

“Kell— _Mike_ , I wasn’t trying to jerk you around,” John tried, inwardly cursing himself for misjudging how on edge Kellerman really was tonight; he’d seen him in the bar earlier on – he’d had every opportunity to get a clue, but he'd missed them all like Gharty on a case. “I promise you I wasn’t setting you up for a fall. What would I gain by that?”

“You tell me,” Kellerman challenged him. “You fucking tell me, because I need some more intel so that I can see this shit coming a whole lot better in the future. You, Julianna, every fucking doubter in Homicide and the whole of my Arson crew, my dumbass brothers, my ex-wife… How am I so good of a detective if I can’t see when I’m about to get the carpet yanked out from underneath me by everyone I open up to?”

“Mike, you had a run of bad luck; it’s not a reflection on you, or inevitable, or anything else your mind might be throwing out to try and rationalise the things that are beyond your control. And I can tell you that what just happened here is because _I_ fucked up. I fucked up in a way that has everything to do with me and nothing to do with you, aside from h—” John caught himself. Should he actually go on and say what he’d been about to? _‘…how much I’m attracted to you.’_

The sudden gleam in Kellerman’s eye gave him a pretty good indication that he’d pre-empted what John was going to admit anyway. “I’m not a moron, Munch. Whether you really meant to or not, you know that you cued me up to move on you tonight, and now you’re all ‘oh fuck’ about it because I turned out to be a whole five-alarmer of a shitshow. You can see that the guy you’ve been sniffing around, and looking at just a little past long enough for me to catch you doing it, is actually interested in you as well, and while you might really _want_ it, apparently you don’t want to have to _deal with_ it!”

“Listen to me.” John had been racing to keep up with Kellerman’s train of thought as it rushed out, but the one thing that was cutting crystal clear was that as pissed off and drunk as he was, he'd already seen straight through to something John was only just acknowledging himself. Things _had_ been building up to some sort of moment between them, and it was John’s lack of attention that had let it happen like this. “You’re right to think I’m interested in something more than just friendship, and I promise you that I want us to talk about that properly, but we both know it would be a really bad idea to try doing it tonight.” John hoped Kellerman could read his eyes as clearly as he was apparently reading his mind, because it had been a long time since he'd quite so sincerely wished for someone to listen and agree with him as he was then.

His partner was certainly staring him right in the pupils, and John didn’t flinch. Kellerman swallowed hard and dropped his gaze to the floor. “Yeah, alright,” he mumbled. “Rain check on this conversation before either of us has anything else to regret in the morning.”

“Okay.” John’s relief coloured the word. “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“John—” Kellerman bit his lip and shook his head. “Fuck, this is gonna sound like a line… Don’t go. I mean, will you just stay with me for a while longer? I don’t think I want to be alone tonight.”

John nodded, his chest clenching. How could he walk away after hearing that? “Sure, I can stay.”

 

***    

 

He woke with a start, neck aching from sleeping at an awkward angle and his skin uncomfortably hot in the still air of the cabin, to find Kellerman watching him quietly from the bed. “What time is—” he began to ask automatically, before his mind caught up to speed. “How long have you been staring at me like that?”

A brief flash of amusement passed across Kellerman’s face. “Relax, I’m not some kind of freak. I was just trying to work out what was so wrong with the bed that you chose to spend the night over there instead.”

“Sharing a bed wouldn’t have seemed a little intimate to you?”

Kellerman shrugged. “We sit that close in a car, or at a table… but I think I get it, John – sharing a bed with me, that’s a touch too personal for noted ladies’ man, Detective Munch, right?”

John frowned. “How much do you remember about last night?”

“My question first: if you weren’t going to fuck me, why not just go home and save yourself the backache?”

Well, _shit._ “I guess you don’t remember a lot then.” John paused. What was he supposed to do or say if that was the case? He didn’t have the heart or the stomach to fill in the gaps for him, and he heard himself glibly choosing an easy way out. “What makes you so sure we didn’t fuck?”  

Kellerman’s lip curled wryly in response. “Hey, if we did fuck and _then_ you slept on the couch, don’t even tell me, okay? If I don’t remember that then I don’t _want_ to.”

“Don’t worry, we didn’t sleep together.”

That half-amused snort of his again. Then Kellerman shifted on the pillows and closed his eyes, settling one arm over his forehead, and for a brief moment John felt like burying his face in his hands while the other man couldn’t see him. He didn’t let himself though, instead looking around to remind himself where he’d put down his coat; he just wanted to get out of there now. It seemed that in the sober light of morning Kellerman was back on as even a keel as he ever managed, and the fact that somewhere along the line his alcohol consumption had apparently gifted him with blackouts meant that their partnership might just get away with last night. He got to his feet and winced at the crack in his joints as his legs straightened.

“Jesus, John. I’ve got an oil can up in the front there if you need some,” Kellerman murmured.

“I’m laughing. That’s funny,” he deadpanned on autopilot. “Now I’m leaving.” His jacket was on the floor by the bench, and John scooped it up and checked nothing had come out of the pockets. Kellerman had rolled over and pulled the covers up around his ears and John wondered if it was deliberately to put his back to him. “See you in the squadroom.”

He got a muffled acknowledgement in response, and as he walked past the side of the bed to get to the door, John said more quietly, “Don’t forget your car isn’t here; the keys are in the register drawer at the Waterfront.”

He thought he heard Kellerman thank him as he was stepping out, but it might have just been wishful thinking.

 

 

_**November**_

 

Midnight on another cold night months later and John was sitting on the edge of his own couch, coffee table strewn with piles of old photographs and magazines, when a knock at the front door interrupted his nostalgia trip. If the walls were actually thin enough that the neighbours had been disturbed by him humming, “We are the same, Suzanne,” off-key along with the record player, then he seriously had to start thinking about moving again… He got up and padded over to peer around the curtains, ready to feign contrition as if the old couple didn’t regularly wake _him_ up at the crack of dawn with their unrealistically energetic carpet-beating, or whatever the hell that noise they made was.

To his surprise it was Kellerman out there on the step, blowing into his hands and squinting at the door. He glanced across to the window like a murder police naturally would, and that and the obvious lights pretty much blew John’s option of leaving the knock go unanswered. He didn’t feel the need to, though; Kellerman was a whole lot smoother and calmer now than he’d been earlier in the year, and a late night visit from him didn’t seem like the alarming prospect it might have been back then. John wasn’t exactly sure whether it was the dust finally settling on the Arson probe that had made the difference – people’s suspicions fading once the headlines became yesterday’s news – or if Kellerman had just worked through his demons and come out the other side, but it had happened. After that one chaotic night on the boat they’d returned to keeping their own counsel about whatever attraction might be simmering away underneath their everyday interaction, and found a rhythm with working together that had seen them turn into a quietly effective partnership, putting down their share of cases and being decent company to each other while they were doing it.

He opened the door and Kellerman looked carefully at him for a second, reading his face. “Is it okay if I come in? I know it’s late, but you’re somebody who does late, so I figured I was good.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” John asked him, holding the door back so that he could step around it and shake off some of the cold before ditching his boots and hanging up his jacket on the coat stand.

“I was just walkin’ around the harbour for a while, thinking about some things, and I realised I’d come near your place; thought I’d see if you were up, that’s all.” Kellerman went over to the couch and sat down next to the space where John had been a moment ago, taking in the piles of old pictures and faded newspapers. “You having a clear out, or a roll with Memory Lane?”

John smiled. “Memory Lane. Can I get you a drink?”

“Nah, I’m fine, thanks. Who’s the guy there?”

“Who?” John tried to follow Kellerman’s gaze to which of the pictures on the table he meant.

“The one with the cigarette, black and white.”

“Oh, John Cassavetes.” He settled back down beside Kellerman, knees brushing lightly. “It’s an offprint from a photobook; someone gave it to me because I’d been talking to them about Johnny Staccato.”

Kellerman leaned over to look more closely at the picture. “And who's Johnny Staccato?”

“Johnny Staccato – it was a TV show when I was younger. Cassavetes played a private detective who solved mysterious crimes while hanging out in Greenwich Village and playing Jazz piano. Let’s just say it had a formative effect on me.”

“A PI, huh? Like, a Sam Spade kinda style?”

“That’s it. I was crazy for all of that – all the pulp heroes.” John pointed at an old copy of Black Mask amongst the papers. “That magazine’s probably worth something to a collector by now, even if it’s not one of the rare ones with the Dashiell Hammett stories.”

“You keep hold of a lot of old stuff,” Kellerman observed, looking around the room.

“I suppose… It’s easy to be sentimental when you live on your own. It’s been whittled down a bit with every marriage; no one wants their new home cluttered up with all their spouse’s old crap, but there are some things I just like keeping around, even if it’s only in a box under a chair somewhere, you know?”

Kellerman nodded. “I know.”

There was a pause as they both seemed lost in thought, John wondering what kind of things Kellerman kept tucked away in the tiny storage cupboards on his boat. Sports trophies and ticket stubs, he guessed. Maybe he had a little box with a wedding band in it, or was he the type who would sling it twenty feet into the Inner Harbour before regretting that for the next ten years?

“John?”

“Ye—” When he turned, Kellerman was right there, kiss quieting his mouth and one hand slipping up and around his jaw. This time, John didn’t pull away; he kissed him back and felt the tentative caution of Kellerman’s initial contact bloom into something definite and confident in response. Now the pieces fell into place - his partner was ready to try this again, and _this time_ it felt right: John was kissing a Kellerman who was clear and steady, who’d thought it through and sought him out deliberately tonight, instead of him being the nearest warm body on a wet and miserable waterfront, and it was exactly how he’d hoped their first kiss would be.

John could feel his own body responding keenly, heart pounding and dick hardening straight away, a heavy heat pooling low in his groin. Kellerman’s hand disappeared from his face and touched in on his thigh, sliding up to get a feel for how tight the material of his pants was pulling, and John could pinpoint the second when Kellerman realised how hard he was – even before his fingers had closed firm around him – by the way the kiss suddenly intensified again. And it was ridiculously quick to be getting so breathless from this, but somehow they both were, small hitches and half-formed sounds slipping out between them. Everything about it was so intimate and passionate that it was difficult to hold onto the fact that this was his partner he was winding tongues with; that the mouth on his was the one usually talking smart at him around a wad of gum.

Kellerman was stroking him through the cotton of his pants now, and a not-insignificant portion of John’s brain was ready to switch off and just let him do whatever he felt like while he lay back and enjoyed it, but that wasn’t the kind of first impression he really wanted to leave, regardless of how eager Kellerman might have been to overwhelm him with his touch. He got his own hands into the mix and pulled Kellerman’s sweater and t-shirt up to feel his chest under his palms, and it prompted Kellerman to lean back from the kiss and pull the sweater off entirely with a crackle of static, shaking his hair out and opening his eyes to meet John’s and ask, “We’re really doing this, huh?”

“We really are,” John answered, a more articulate response deserting him in the face of Kellerman’s fingers sneaking back to his fly to undo it and work his cock out of his underwear. Then he was ducking down to suck it and John’s brain started campaigning for the AWOL option again. Kellerman’s mouth was as hot and teasing as it had been when they were kissing, and the feelings he was sparking in the pit of John’s stomach every time he took him deep made him want to make some noise that would really disturb the neighbours. He bit his lip and ran his hands though his partner’s hair instead, caressing the back of his neck and earning himself the vibration of an appreciative moan around his cock. It was something he wanted to hear more of, to know that Kellerman was getting off on his touch too.

“Mike,” he murmured. “Shift around so I can reach you as well.”

Kellerman drew back and gave him a quizzical look, but when John motioned for him to get up, simultaneously moving to lie flat on the couch and hooking two fingers through the empty belt loop at Kellerman’s hip to guide him sideways, he caught on to where this was going and his eyebrows arched even higher. “You want me to get on top?”

“Undo your fly first.” The hard outline of Kellerman’s cock was obscenely visible under the denim of his jeans, and when he popped the buttons and eased it out – stroking it a couple of times like he knew just how good that looked – John was pretty sure that what he had in mind was going to be _very_ worth the effort. Then Kellerman was inelegantly climbing onto the couch again, arranging his knees carefully on each side of John’s head and leaning forward to pick up where he’d left off a moment ago.

John reached up to take hold of Kellerman’s cock and pull him down and between his lips, holding the open edges of the jeans out of the way as he tongued the slick head and stroked and squeezed the shaft at the same time. The effect it had on his partner was electric, and when Kellerman’s hips began to dip and shift to meet John’s mouth, slipping into the same pattern with his hands and his lips and his breathing, John knew they’d found the rhythm that was going to finish this right.

There, wrapped around each other and moving together as the heat intensified between them, he could tell exactly when the pleasure and tension coiling in his own body began to mirror in the tightening of Kellerman’s abdominal muscles and the tremble of his thighs; he could feel all the little shudders and stutters and then suddenly there was hot breath against his skin as Kellerman had to take his lips off his cock and rest his forehead on John’s hip, jerking him off erratically as he moaned, “Oh fuck, that’s so good.”

He sucked harder, knowing that Kellerman was going to unravel any second; to lose it and shoot in his mouth, and the anticipation was making John want to come right with him.

“Don’t stop, oh _fuck_ ,” Kellerman gasped out, fingers sliding in the pre-come on John’s cock and working him just exactly _there_. “John, I…”

And then he was spilling down John’s throat, his heartfelt groan all that John needed to hear to tip _him_ over the edge and have him coming all over Kellerman’s hand, dropping his head down to the cushions to close his eyes and swallow and savour the fact that they’d really just fucking managed that.

They held their position for a moment, getting their breath back and cooling down until eventually Kellerman broke the spell. “I don’t know if I can get up.”

“You need some help?”

“Just while I climb off you – I don’t wanna clip you going over.”

John reached for Kellerman’s thighs again and steadied him as he straightened up and clambered from around his head. By the time John had got himself into a sitting position, he had settled in the other corner of the couch with his knees splayed and fly still obscenely open, and he was grinning and wiping his fingers with the hem of his t-shirt.

“Shit, I gotta say right now that there haven’t been too many times where I was running so hot with somebody that we pulled that one off,” Kellerman told him. “When’s the last time you came from a 69?”

“In ‘69,” John replied automatically, and smiled at the huff of laughter it surprised out of his partner. “Truthfully… I don’t remember. Actually I don’t remember the last time I made out and came on a couch either, for that matter.” John waved a hand at the old cushions and the rucked-up throw that had previously been covering for the fact that the furniture was probably _manufactured_ in 1969.

“It was really good,” Kellerman said, tipping his head back and closing his eyes.

“You score all of your sexual encounters for the other person?”

“Not a score,” he mumbled. “Just a thing to say; a compliment, an observation, whatever…”

John was quite charmed to discover that Kellerman was one for getting incoherent in the afterglow. “You want an ashtray, or a drink or something?” he asked, stretching to get the ache out of his left wrist before pulling at his waistband so that he would be able to stand up with a bit more modesty than his pants around his ankles. He really needed a glass of water.

“Just give me a minute.”

“Don’t fall asleep where you are,” John warned over his shoulder as he ducked into the kitchen. “There’s a perfectly good bed in the other room and we’re going there.”

“You wanna lie next to me all night and do everything again in the morning?” Kellerman asked.

“Yes,” John called. “What kind of trick question is that?”

“I’m serious; if we _are_ ‘really doing this’ then that means waking up and still wanting to kiss each other, and leaving a night out early to go home and talk shit and watch old movies together, and spending whole weekends naked, and… stuff like that, right?”

“I’m fully expecting us to do that,” John said as he walked back in. He didn’t know exactly what it was that Kellerman was trying to reassure himself of, but he could tell that it was significant to him. If John was being honest, it wasn’t quite so far off the kind of thing _his_ inner voice would come up with when it was talking about hopes and fears. “Mike, I’ve been around too long to want the kind of relationship that’s based on sex that you forget about when the sun comes up, or full of conversations you never have with each other because you’re actually _not_ ‘really doing this’. And I can also tell you right now that I’m not planning to run hot and cold on you or take anything for granted. Getting a chance at this with you is something that I am not in a hurry to fuck up,” he finished quietly, leaning down to offer Kellerman a hand up off the couch.

He was caught by surprise when Kellerman took it and held it still like that for a moment instead of standing straight away, weaving their fingers together and twisting so that their palms touched. “John… Thanks for giving _me_ a chance.”

John held on as Kellerman stood up, until they were face to face as well as palm to palm. “Here’s to second chances. Come to bed with me.”

 

_-End._


End file.
